Being a football coach is one of the most rewarding jobs in the world – unless you can’t pay the bills. Las Vegas Raiders head coach Klint Kubiak faced that reality check after just three years of coaching at Texas A&M. Kubiak was the Offensive quality control coach from 2010 to ‘11, and then a Graduate assistant and inside receivers coach in 2012. But being newly married and making $17,000 didn’t work for him, so he chose the oil fields over the gridiron.

“It wasn’t that I didn’t love football,” Kubiak said on Bussin’ With The Boys. “It was that I wasn’t making any money. I was newly married and I just got done with grad school, and just in a transition, and I felt kind of like a deadbeat husband, not bringing home any money.

“I worked for Kliff Kingsbury; he went to Texas Tech (in 2013). I wanted to stay another year at A&M. I decided just to go try a new job, and it was a great job. Was fortunate to have an opportunity to try it out, and I just spent a few weeks on the road and realized this wasn’t for me. I was going to try to get back into coaching. So it’s just one of those things where I didn’t want to just prolong the inevitable and know this is not for me. I just wanted to get back to my passion.”

Now, Kubiak has told this story before. In an interview with The Athletic this February, he revealed that his first job was to inventory oil pipes in East Texas along Highway 21, and he knew he “was out of [his] element.” But that job was going to pay him $60,000, and that was bigger than any incentive football was giving him at the time.

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But then, barely 14 days into his new career, Kubiak got a call from one of the receivers he’d coached at A&M – Uzoma Nwachuwu. As a coach, Kubiak had put him through the grind, and per the interview, he wasn’t ever expecting a call from Nwachuwu. But that single phone call changed everything.

“I had a great conversation with him,” Kubiak told The Athletic. “And he just made me realize I was doing the wrong thing, that I needed to get back into coaching. … When I got that call, within two hours, I was calling my boss and saying, ‘Thanks, but no thanks.’”

Cut to 2013, and Klint Kubiak became the Offensive Quality Control Coach for the Minnesota Vikings (2013 – 2014). His next gig landed him at Kansas as the wide receiver coach in 2015. Once he became the Offensive assistant for the Denver Broncos in 2016, the only way to go was up. Since then, Kubiak has been a quarterbacks coach, an offensive coordinator (Vikings, 2019 – 2021), a passing game coordinator (Broncos, 2022), and back to being the OC for two different teams before finally landing the top job with the Raiders this offseason.

Now, he has a new team in the middle of a massive rebuild, the No. 1 Draft Pick in rookie quarterback Fernando Mendoza, and the history of a storied franchise on his back, with a whole load of expectations.

If that young man inventorying oil pipes in East Texas hadn’t gotten that phone call from his receiver, he would have still returned to football someday. But speaking in what-ifs, that journey might not have given him a Super Bowl ring (LX), and it might have taken a long time to get his first head coaching role. But now, the 2025 Coordinator of the Year finally has one of the most rewarding jobs in football.